Dear Neighbor,
I hope that you, your family and friends are all enjoying the Spring. After
what seemed to be a harsh winter, we could all use a bit of nice weather.
At City Hall, we are entering another season that would appear to be
“harsh” this year: budget season.
For the past several years, the City budget has actually taken advantage
of a better economy by “rolling” billions of tax dollars forward and by
creating a large “rainy day” fund. Those days are behind us, unfortunately, and
the economic disaster that we recently experienced has increased our City deficit
by over a billion dollars.
Up in Albany, where budget rules are less strict than they are here, the
situation is much worse. By the time you receive this survey, the State may have
passed a new budget. (It was due on April 1st.) It is increasingly likely that the
deficits in Albany will be passed on to the City.
Even though we can count on our local state legislators to fight to insure that
New York City does not bear an unfair share of state reductions in areas like
education, health care, youth and senior services, one result is absolutely
inevitable: the afore-mentioned City budget deficit will grow significantly larger.
We are faced with abysmal choices…so this budget survey will ask some
pretty depressing questions. Each of the choices in the questions is something
that has actually been mentioned as a final result of this budget process….and I
think it is fair to say that one or more of these things may well happen.
I also know that many of us are financially stressed. That’s why I voted
against raising property taxes last year. The property tax, the only tax that the
City Council has actual control over, affects everyone, owners and renters alike.
Can we afford to raise this tax in this economic climate?
I look forward to hearing your opinion. As I have in past years, I promise
that I will read and respond to every survey that I receive….and we receive
a lot of them. Your opinion helps shape the priorities that I fight for at City Hall.
And I can make you one other promise. I will be in there fighting to
preserve critical City services, services that we need in our neighborhoods,
and fighting to keep our City as affordable as possible.
Please return your survey as soon as possible!

29 comments to Lew Fidler Sends Out Budget Survey

Want to "keep this City affordable"? The city state and fedral governments continue to spend and grow well beyond the rate of inflation year aftyer year.

Just one example-we have a federal Department of Education. It operates no schools. And yet since it's founding it has had no positive impact on education at all, and possibly amde things worse by stoppoing states from experimenting with different methods because they're too busy teaching standardized test nonsense. In fact by any measure today we have as many dropouts and fewer students advancing to college. It does give bureaucrats tons of money to essentially goof off at taxpayer expense and it gets bigger every year. And this crosses party line, since Bush 43 expanded it's reach with NCLB.

Stop spending on all these crazy programs. Too many people view government as nothing more than a spoils system, and they want theirs. And such stupidity is not what founded this country nor made it great.

STOP Government spending!!! How do you increase spending but then cut services? Under Obama there are more people on welfare and more taxes for the working people…Why are we being punished for working? We can't all be on welfare the city will fold.

I know this is "off-topic" but maybe Lew could find out WHY we need a panel to help legal aliens. I saw this on the news last night; Gov. Paterson wants to start this panel (the only one in the US). Meanwhile he is slashing school budgets to the bone….

Or why we need 5 boro presidents, a public advocate, CCRB, and a NYC Civil Rights Commission. Any or all of these bureaucracies could dissappear tomorrow and not be missed. They are all a total waste of tax dollars.

If anyone else knows of any pointless city agencies or offices post them here. And forward this to Lew Fiedler.

Have some family "on the job" and deal with NYPD in business rather often. By and large the rank and file do a very difficult job very well. as you can tell from Mike "It was teabaggers mad about health care"Bloomturd and Society Guy Kelly the leadership is pretty hurting. But the running joke is that 1 PP has more loafers than a Florsheim shoe factory. You cannot civilianize all NYPD adminstration but 1 PP is bureaucracy on top of paperwork and could easily assign half of those people into the field.

Under Kelly NYPD remains the only major police department in most of America that does not have laptop computers in patrol cars and still employs typewriters for a good chunk of paperwork. Most arrests in other jurisdictions take less than a few hours, NYPD can take a whole day(though in fariness some of this can be laid at the feet of each of the 5 DAs). And this despite Kelly paying millions for various consultants and software providers and in house MISD people to have functional computer systems, NYPD still doens't have a decent compute system. Kelly in his prior stint as commissioner mothballed a very good system that the Transit Police employed when the departments merged.

If Lew Fidler had not voted to do away with term limits, we would not have a Mayor who made the inane statement that the person or persons who would have caused untold casualties in Times Square must have been someone disillusioned with the "Health Care Bill". If he wants to save the taxpayers money, he might begin by giving back their $ 80 K he took to add bells and whistles to his campaign, when all he needed to beat his adversary was to run for the office.

The city council approved a a whopping 12% hike in water rates. This is arbitrary and punitive and a sock in the eye to middle class home owners who also suffered through another huge increase in real estate taxes. How can they raise real estate taxes when the value of peoples' homes have decreased? I read in the newspaper that they want to raise the water rates because people are now really conserving water and the revenue has declined. Why are we being penalized for doing the right thing?

Bagels, they are getting us on all sides! They swore the water meters wouldn't be used like this, (big suprise-they lied).And don't forget 12% is just for the water coming in, your sewer chage is 125% of that. Add to that the ridiculous homeowners insurance rates, Con Ed just getting approved for ANOTHER increase, and the threat to again increase real estate taxes. Meanwhile, my contract ran out in 2007, fat chance to get a new one. My union advocated voting for Bloomberg, not that I did, there was a contract on the table and as soon as he won, it was taken off! How are we supposed to pay for all these hikes? Even the 250.00 that was the only aid my kids get for college is going to be cut to 175.00. How much can they keep taking?

Beachwalker, I said this more than once on this site, we need to vote out incumbents every time they vote for something that's not in their constituents best interest. No exceptions!!!!

We should have been outraged when our mayor circumvented the two-term limit with the help of Lew Fidler and most of the City Council. We need to keep voting them out until they understand that they are suppose to be working for us. No exceptions!!!!

For those Bloomberg supporters on this site I would like for them to explain to me how a man who is earning one dollar a year while mayor was able to increase his personal net worth from $4 billion to $16 billion in eight years? Could it have something to do with all the capital projects and giveaway programs he offered to big business in our city?

A case in point:

Thor Enterprises purchased a piece of property west of Nathan's along Surf Avenue from the City for $25 million and then a few short years later the City purchased the same property back from Thor Enterprises for $99 million. Thor then purchased 12.5 acres along Surf Avenue, including Astro land, for $105 million. Three years later, with no improvements to the land and during a real estate slump, sells a little less than 50% of that land back to the city for $100 million.

I would love someone to explain the Coney Island debacle! I guess we should be grateful that Thor did not build the glitzy Vegas of the east, but they certainly walked away with a bundle. Dick Zigan, the unofficial mayor of Coney Island, who for decades fought for what was right in Coney was bought off by a 5 million dollar grant to buy the Coney museum building. Five million bought him off. I believe that is why he didn't argue against Ringling Bros. being able to run their animal torture show down there. Hopefully, with new rides going in, it will become more of the Coney Island that people will want to go to for day trips, an affordable place to take the kids and not the overpriced, glitzy, time share condos and hotels that the mayor wanted. He cares so much more for tourists than New Yorkers! Hopefully, in the end "the peoples playground" will prevail.

Getting back to the water charge, after certain house holds refused to have meters installed the city did not enforce the meter installation and now only punishes those who adhered to the law and did as was asked. We suffer the rate increase while those who scoffed at the meter law enjoy the old flat rate system.

YES why is this, where is the justification…see we are to busy working to launch an all out protest. If you havent noticed by taxing us higher and imposing stricter penalties you have forced people out of work and into forclosure. Better to have $10.00 from one million households than to have $50.00 from one thousand, if my math is correct. Basic economics

On Lew Fidler's questionnaire he ask what we can do to reduce the budget without service cuts?

Reply:

Having our governor and our mayor rescind the 17+ percent raises they gave their appointees this year while we're in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression and at the same time asking the rest of us to make monetary sacrifices.

Lew & his cronies love to tell us what they have "given us". The answer is LESS THAN ZERO. We have given them & it's time to take away. Stop spending OUR money like drunken sailors & start budgeting. Hey lou, spend less than your constituants will pay in taxes & they will thrive. Very simple. Stop looking for new ways to generate "revenue" for programs we don't need or want….there is no more hidden revenue, we are all going to move away if these hidden taxes keep on creeping up on us. Stop over spending!

Lew Fidler is the chairman of the Youth Services committee. This is the program that provides summer jobs to low income students that thankfully has been gutted by the state cutting 35 million dollars. Fidler is upset about it, saying, "It's penny wise and pound foolish" and that "Not having something to do is never an excuse to do something stupid and illegal, but we can't shy away from our responsibilities as adults." Oh really? In Gerrittsen Beach, he is all for arresting kids that get into mischief for having nothing to do, but we are supposed to be frightened by the prospect of minority youth not being given do-nothing summer jobs to keep them out of trouble? This is a BS program that put children in jobs cleaning schools in summer, jobs that used to go to adults or college students earning union wages. They gutted custodians budgets and everone kept asking, ' but how will the summer cleaning get done?'. Then the children showed up. A big problem considering they can't use the chemicals needed to strip floors and clean, and they can't have sharp tools needed to remove miles of scotch tape from walls. They can't paint, or wax floors, and you can't let them climb ladders. They are 14-15 years old, are basically unsupervised all day. Mostly they just hang out in a room fooling around or run around the building. There is a leader of the program who stops by and checks their attendance, but thats it. We really only can use them to move furniture in and out of rooms as they are cleaned. They do nothing but complain that the work is too hard, they are hot, etc. Just about anything you ask them to do has to be redone anyway, or it just gets left dirty because there is no time or manpower. In Sept., teachers are complaining about what is missing or vandalized in their classrooms. It's beyond ridiculous, use the money to give people REAL jobs. If they commit crimes because they have nothing to do, do what you do here, Lew, have them arrested!

someone tell me what essential service OTB provides ? The city claims it does nothing but lose money but keeps finding money to keep it going. The only reason could be that their hands are in the cookie jar. St. Vincent's could'nt be saved, Fire houses close down, bus lines are eliminated , but according to the powers that be OTB loses money but has to be saved. Something smells rotten.

In England, Ireland and much of the rest of Europe, bookmakers are legally licensed and profitable rather than owned and badly operated by the government. And from the times I visited there wasn't the vagrant persence we have at Avenue U(as I noted making my Derby bets Saturday)because a private company has an interest in keeping the premises neat and orderly. They make tidy profits and pay serious taxes. OTB is arguably the only bookie in the world that loses money. NYC could license private concerns to do the same and make licensing fees annaully and taxes on the winnings. And if they took sports gambling, more than that. And the NFL, NBA and MLB are not going to move any teams out of here. The Jets and Giants are across the river anyway.

Why did we bail out the Banks, mismanaged greedy businesses that proved how greedy they were when they gave severance pays to tons of their executives who ran their company to the ground. So what are we saying "Incompetence deserves reward" as he is sailing on his ship in the carribean. Why did we need the banks anyway, how about if your bank went under then your mortgage was resolved. Think of the money pouring into business by people that had no mortgage. But no lets bail out the banks

If you have attended a Town Hall, Community Board or property owners meeting, you would hear one or another of the politicians tell you, "I just gave your neighborhood thousands of dollars". What they don't say, is that they have just given you back a small percentage of your money, after they have redistributed the rest on projects that have nothing to do with you; and to a bloated staff to keep their propaganda flowing.

All of these comments are well written and bring up some very valid points on how the city has duped and I would venture to say cheated it's citizens by manipulating the way real estate taxes are calculated and by arbitrarily raising the water rates.

wlEW we why are you wasting tax payers money with a survey. You disregard what our community wants. We wanted term limits and you decided you needed a job for 4 more years. Lew your all about your self and making the $$ from your law pratice. you don't care about our community.